With more and more AI showing up in Google searches as of late, I’ve been leaning extra hard on that one magic word that makes the internet work: Reddit. It’s got its problems, but appending “Reddit” to a search is still the surest bet I have of getting an honest opinion from a real person, which is more than I can say for some other platforms. Unfortunately, it seems like the “Reddit” trick is about to get a lot less useful, and once again, you can blame AI for it.

The problem with any live forum is that information comes and goes as people delete old posts and new updates break older parts of the site. There used to be a way to get around this, but going forward, that loophole’s getting closed.

Yes, Reddit is about to start blocking the Internet Archive. The site, run by a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the open internet, is host to the Wayback Machine, a popular way to browse internet pages that are no longer active, or have changed significantly since they first went up. Simply enter a URL in the Machine’s search box, and you’ll be able to browse captures of what that page used to look like, sometimes going as far back as the 1990s.

It’s a useful way to see how a site has changed, or access information that’s supposed to be long gone. In Reddit’s case, you could use it to look at, say, a hotel review that’s since been deleted. Sure, you might feel a bit awkward about reading a post that’s been purposefully taken down, but because deleting all your threads when leaving the service is a common practice, the Wayback Machine is a great way to preserve useful content well into the future, and keep classic memes from becoming lost media.

Unfortunately, while Reddit says it’s not against the Wayback Machine in general, it’s about to stop the Internet Archive from indexing anything but the Reddit homepage, which means the only archives it’ll be able to keep going forward will be lists of what was popular on Reddit on a certain day. Individual subreddits and posts will be blocked.

That’s not totally useless, say if you’re an internet researcher, but it will make all future Reddit threads way more temporary in nature, and will definitely hurt casual web searches down the line. If I review a hotel now, and then delete my thread, users in a month or two won’t be able to easily see it. On the bright side, existing archives shouldn’t be affected by this block, at least unless Reddit asks the Internet Archive to take down existing captures. But as time passes, the lack of Reddit archives is only going to become a bigger issue.

So why is this happening? Basically, Reddit doesn’t like AI companies scraping content from its site, at least without paying for it first.

“Internet Archive provides a service to the open web,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt told the Verge, “but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine.”

Essentially, Reddit wants to tightly control which AI companies it works with (it’s sued over this before), and has blocked most of them from crawling its site. However, with some then turning to scraping Reddit pages captured by the Internet Archive instead, the company is now going to crack down on those captures as well. Basically, we’re paying the price for a few bad apples.

Rathschmidt told The Verge that limits on the Internet Archive will start “ramping up” today, although he wasn’t entirely clear about how. I’ve reached out to Reddit for details, but for now, I did double check, and I’m still able to access archives that already exist, so at least Reddit hasn’t gone nuclear yet.

As for any future posts, all might not be lost. The Verge also spoke to Wayback Machine director Mark Graham, who said that the Internet Archive has a “longstanding relationship with Reddit,” and that there are “ongoing discussions about this matter.”

Windows 10 end of life is nigh: On Oct. 14, 2025, Microsoft will officially stop supporting the OS. That doesn’t mean Windows 10 machines will stop working overnight. On the contrary, the experience will feel exactly the same. The difference, however, is that Microsoft will no longer issue security updates for Windows 10, putting those users at great risk going forward.

Those users will either have to update their existing machines to Windows 11, buy a new machine that is compatible with Windows 11, or enroll in an extra year of Extended Security Updates. That last option is likely the choice for most Windows 10 users who want to continue safely using their OS in an uninterrupted manor: It’s like an alternate reality in which Microsoft never ended Windows 10 support, and now continues to patch security vulnerabilities—at least for a year.

If you want to keep your Windows 10 PC protected from security vulnerabilities past Oct. 14, this is the option for you. The thing is, it likely involves a one-time payment of $30, unless you’re open to one of Microsoft’s two alternative enrollment methods: opting into Windows Backup, or redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points. There’s apparently another option, however, that most of us hadn’t considered: suing Microsoft directly.

The lawsuit against Microsoft

Lawrence Klein of California filed a lawsuit against Microsoft in June, alleging the company is unfairly forcing customers to buy new computers in order to continue using Windows. Klein argues that customers bought their Windows 10 PCs with the expectation that they’d be able to upgrade them into the future, while, at the same time, Microsoft was knowingly selling machines that they planned to make impossible to update.

Klein himself has two PCs that reportedly cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. The lawsuit doesn’t specify which minimum requirements Klein’s hardware is missing, but it does highlight general specs including Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or Zen 2 CPUs and up, TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) support, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. The TPM 2.0 requirement in particular went viral when Windows 11 dropped, because it’s simply a piece of security hardware. Even high-end machines without TPM 2.0 weren’t “Windows 11 ready.”

Klein points to Microsoft’s market dominance in this area as the reason behind the decision. In Klein’s view, Microsoft wants customers to use their new AI products, both those products require newer hardware—such as those with neural processing units (NPUs)—in order to run. Windows 10 machines largely do not have the necessary hardware to run Microsoft’s AI products, and, as such, Klein believes Microsoft is trying to force users to buy new machines to boost the number customers using the AI products.

Klein also argues that Microsoft has offered more of a sunset window for previous OS deprecations. The lawsuit points to how the last three deprecations offered an eight year window between when a new OS launches and the previous OS was dropped, while the fourth, Windows XP, offered a seven year window. By contrast, Windows 11 came out in 2021, which offers users a four year window.

There’s also the argument about the number of users who will be affected by this decision. Independent estimates suggest Windows 10 might be running on as many as 54% of PCs around the globe. Klein’s lawsuit argues that Microsoft is putting hundreds of millions of devices in jeopardy, since a lack of security update will leave devices vulnerable.

Does this lawsuit have a chance?

I’m no legal expert, but I am a cynic who covers technology for a living, so my gut says “no.” It’s not necessarily the fact that this is one man against the entity that is Microsoft, though there is that: It’s that some of the main arguments here won’t stand up to scrutiny.

The plaintiff claims Microsoft only gave users less than a year’s notice for Windows 10 end of life; that simply isn’t true. As early as 2021, Microsoft listed the retirement date for Windows 10 on its website. I can buy that the company might not have been as transparent as it could have been with its messaging—general users are not going to be digging through Microsoft’s support documentation—but, to be fair, Oct. 14, 2025 has been the date for over four years now.

Microsoft is also not the first company to drop software support for an OS. In fact, it’s an inevitability. Sure, the window between Windows 11’s release date and Windows 10 end of life is only four years, but Windows 10 came out in 2015. 10 years is not a bad run for an OS. Apple dropped support for macOS Monterey, for example, in 2024, less than three years after it first came out. When you look at hardware support, macOS Monterey was the last supported version for a number of Macs, which were generally released anywhere between 2013 and 2017. That means, depending on your Mac, you received seven to 11 years of security updates. It’s not a perfect comparison, but this is largely how tech works.

I agree that it’s scummy that Microsoft blocked users from upgrading to Windows 11 because of TPM requirements, especially since upgrading an unsupported machine to Windows 11 could result in dropped Microsoft support anyway. I also agree that it’s concerning that the Windows 10 market share is still so high: While some users may enroll in Extended Security Updates or buy a Windows 11 machine, I can imagine millions will not. Will Microsoft really allow that many machines to connect to the internet totally exposed? But at the end of the day, do I think the arguments in this lawsuit are enough? I don’t.

What to do if your PC is still running Windows 10

For all we know, Microsoft changes its stance before Oct. 14, and offer users another option. Maybe they’ll kick the can down the road for another year, and automatically enroll everyone in Extended Security Updates for free. Maybe Klein will win his lawsuit, and bring real change to tech industry.

But that’s speculative. I can only give advice based on what we know now. And right now, Windows 10 support is dropping in October. Before that happens, you need to make a decision that will guarantee continued security updates going forward. That means enrolling in Extended Security Updates in one of the three aforementioned ways, moving to a new Windows 11 machine, or permanently disconnecting your Windows 10 PC from the internet. There are no other safe options.

While I believe it’s unwise to use any unsupported software while connected to the internet, it’s especially dangerous with something like Windows 10. Considering the market share, and the high profile nature of the OS, Windows 10 users are going to be prime targets for bad actors and hackers as soon as Microsoft pulls the plug. They’ll look for any and all security vulnerabilities they can exploit, and without a patch to protect users, they’ll be able to run those exploits against millions of targets.

Personally, I hope Microsoft changes something before October, but there’s no way to know if they will. Until then, the best thing you can do as a Windows 10 user is prepare.

Can you play “Danny Boy” over a phone modem? After 34 years in operation, AOL is finally ending its dial-up service. The news is sure to come as a shock to internet users around the country, plenty of whom are probably asking themselves “AOL still had dial-up?”

But if you live in a rural area, it’s not quite as surprising. As someone who has to resort to DSL whenever I visit my in-laws, and who had to fight to get my mom to swap from an AOL browser to Chrome when I was in college, I can see why AOL’s dial-up lasted so long. According to a 2019 US Census, 265,000 people in the United States are still on dial-up, and AOL’s brand in particular came with a certain veneer of familiarity.

The company was known for making easy-to-use products with an emphasis on personality, so it’s funny how little fanfare the shutdown notice came with. In a 100-word blog posted over the weekend, AOL simply said that its dial-up service will “no longer be available in AOL plans” starting on Sept. 30, 2025. Also joining dial-up in the trash bin are the AOL Dialer software you’d actually use to connect, as well as the AOL Shield browser, a stripped-down version of the company’s current, Chrome-like AOL Shield Pro browser, intended for older operating systems and slower connections.

As for what AOL will still offer, it turns out AOL is more of a data security company now, with a number of ID protection features aimed more at businesses than individual users. That said, you can still sign up for a free AOL plan if you’re hankering for a nostalgic email address, although both paid and free users will have to get their actual internet connections from somewhere else going forward.

Still, there is hope for anyone still clinging to a screeching phone modem for their internet connection. Services like Netzero and Juno still offer dial-up plans in certain zip codes, and Netzero will actually connect you for free if you use fewer than 10 hours a month. Click here to check providers in your area.

Even better, the classic AOL experience isn’t going anywhere. While AOL is ending dial-up service, it will keep offering its AOL Desktop Gold plan, which in addition to including tools to protect you from keyloggers and phishing attempts, also gives you access to the classic AOL browser, as opposed to the more Chrome-ified Shield Pro. It even has the “You’ve got mail” notification.

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Think back to the experiences you’ve had buying event tickets in the past five years or so. Were they seamless? Likely not: After the COVID-19 lockdowns ended, ticket revenue went way up and it got so hard to get tickets that the government had to try to break up the Ticketmaster monopoly.

Getting a ticket to a concert, sporting event, or other live show has never been more fraught (to say nothing of more expensive), but you do have some options. Most ticket sites sell roughly the same or similar seats, but they do so at different prices and with different levels of hoops to jump through. Here’s how to find a good deal.

What frequent ticket buyers advise

Your best bet, according to Redditors, is to go to the box office at the arena or event space for a ticket, as fees are usually pretty low when you buy them in person. Of course, for events with waitlists or ones that you’re planning to travel for, that’s not always an option, although I had great luck two years ago when I called a box office, told the receptionist I was traveling for the show, and bought my tickets over the phone. She upgraded them out of pure niceness, saying she rarely gets to talk to patrons anymore since most ticket-buying takes place online. Still, buying your tickets online is so convenient, it might be worth a few extra bucks to you. Let’s just make sure you’re not spending too many extra bucks.

Over the years I’ve been buying tickets to baseball games and concerts—and especially the last two years of reviewing ticket-sale marketplaces for Lifehacker—I’ve found that the reputations and service quality of each of the following platforms have changed wildly. Ticketmaster has always been considered expensive (spoiler alert: it still is), but has also been considered secure. TickPick used to be the only place to go for all-inclusive pricing with no checkout surprises. Now, a lot of these apps have upped their level of service, but there are still some differences to consider.

Putting ticket platforms to the test

Let’s do a real-world test of the major sites: Ticketmaster, StubHub, Vivid Seats, SeatGeek, and TickPick. There’s also a service called GameTime we’ll look at, plus a newer entrant called XP, but the first one is more for last-minute gets and the second one is still pretty new.

For transparency, I redo this test every year for Lifehacker, so if you visited this page last fall, you may have seen a price comparison of tickets to the Sept. 14 baseball game at Chase Field, which I actually attended. This year, I’ll do ticket prices for this Wednesday’s Twins vs. Yankees game, which I am also attending in just over 48 hours, so my comparisons are as realistic as possible.

Wednesday’s game includes a bobblehead giveaway, so prices are higher and seats are slightly more scarce than they would be for any other midweek match; that’ll give us a good idea of how these apps operate in real crunch times. My tickets are in the 230s and I paid $47 for each of them. For today’s test, let’s see what tickets in that area go for on each platform in question. (And I’ll tell you where I ended up getting mine, too, since I shopped around.)

Ticketmaster

For this year’s test, Ticketmaster shocked me. Typically, you can rely on the biggest name in the ticket sales game to have a ton of seats available. Not this time. For Wednesday’s game, there are no tickets available in sections 228 to 234. To sit in the 200 level at all (which I never do unless forced or seeing a matchup I don’t care about), you won’t spend below $112 per ticket—and that’s before fees. Ticketmaster has helpfully labeled these “$112+,” but will not reveal the total until you log in and enter your payment details. Dastardly. To pay around what I paid, in the $50 range, you’d have to sit in the 400s. May I recommend simply watching the game on TV?

StubHub

StubHub redeemed itself this year. Two years ago, StubHub was transparent with its pricing. Last year, it did a 180 and refused to divulge what “fees” I would be paying until I put in my card information. This year, I can see clearly, without even having to log in, that seats in my chosen section are going for $69 including fees. Transparent pricing is crucial, especially when ticket prices are so absurdly high these days. Still, our North Star here is what I paid last week: $47. With most major events, you can expect ticket prices to go down, not up, as the big day gets closer, as long as there are still plenty of seats available. There are hundreds of tickets to the game still available on StubHub, so this price-gauging is not ideal, bobblehead night or not.

Vivid Seats

Vivid Seats infuriated me last year and I have not patronized it since. I used to buy all my tickets on this platform, since they had a deal where you’d earn free tickets after every few purchases, but last July, as I was getting ready to leave for a game I had bought tickets to, I discovered my purchase had been revoked with no notification. I didn’t get a push notification, an email, or anything, and worse, when I spoke to customer service, they claimed they couldn’t verify my identity (despite me using the platform faithfully for years) and I was barred from purchasing replacement tickets.

Prices and transparency are one thing, but pure functionality and access to the tickets themselves are just as important, if not more so, so I want to be clear about my prior experiences with this particular site. The rewards system is novel and I haven’t found any other marketplaces that offer anything similar, so I actually mourn the free tickets I would earn on here, but I can’t risk my tickets being revoked in the future, so generally speaking, Vivid Seats is a no for me.

For today’s test, I will give credit where it’s due: You can sit in the first row of the section for $71 per ticket, including fees. I am in the eighth row, for what it’s worth, and would consider an extra $25 or so worth it to sit in front. (I really do hate sitting higher up!) Elsewhere in the section, you can sit for up to $100 per ticket. Moreover, Vivid Seats is following the lead of many of its competitors. This year, the price is clearly labeled to include fees.

SeatGeek

In last year’s comparison, SeatGeek also refused to show me the total price until I had entered my card information. This year, like nearly everyone else, they’ve improved transparency considerably. Seats in our chosen section are $57 each, the price quoted includes fees, and you can tap all the way to the final screen with the total due clearly visible. I’ll admit I never use this one, not because I have something against it, but just because I’m not in the habit of it. Today’s test results could cause me to change my behavior.

TickPick

Let me start by saying I am biased toward TickPick and always will be because this is the platform that saved the day last year when Vivid Seats arbitrarily revoked my tickets. Since then, I’ve used it consistently; it’s the platform I used to buy tickets to tonight’s game and Tuesday’s game, too, but not Wednesday’s game (more on that in a moment). TickPick was the pioneer in listing all-inclusive prices and though today’s test has revealed that most of its competitors have now followed suit, I’ll always respect it for being the first to bundle fees in with the quoted price.

Selection here is lower than some of its competitors, though. While there are seats available in nearly all sections, there are simply fewer of them to choose from. In fact, there are no seats available in the section we’re testing, but seats in the next section over in the same row as my tickets are going for $87 each. One more section over and you’re looking at $44 each. All things considered, the best prices are here, even if the selection isn’t as good.

GameTime

The tickets available on GameTime are even more limited, as the site is designed for “last-minute” buys. In each section, you have maybe one or two options. In the section we’re testing, you have one: Two tickets in the seventh row for $68 each, including fees. With GameTime, maybe even more than with other platforms, you can expect these to go down in price the closer to the event you get, since the app is all about last-minute deals.

XP

Finally, I will reveal where I got my beautiful $47 tickets to what is, apparently, a very in-demand match: a new app called XP. Why? I use a different app called Claim to get cash back on certain purchases and XP was the deal of the week, which meant I would get $25 back if I spent $50 there. I am a sucker for money-back apps, plus I wanted to test something new.

Now, obviously, the tickets I bought are not available anymore, but front-row tickets in that section are going on XP for $70, including fees. That is $1 less than you’d pay at Vivid Seats for front-row tickets in the section. Mostly, though, selection here was limited, too. Overall, I found purchasing my XP tickets very easy, but like the other non-Ticketmaster platforms listed here, it’s a resale app, so the seller has not yet transferred them to me and, still anxious from my Vivid Seats fiasco last year, that’s making me nervous.

The app does seem to have decent customer service, however; in fact, it’s their whole marketing schtick. I received a confirmation email, details on how to contact support, and a rough estimate that my tickets will be delivered no later than tomorrow.

Conclusions and things to keep in mind

For most of these options, you’re paying between $57 and $112—forgive me, “$112+”—to sit in the general area of our test for a game that doesn’t start for over 48 hours. That’s a huge range, in my opinion, especially since the event is in two days and the seats aren’t even the best. This year, the winners of our head-to-head are Vivid Seats and TickPick, though Vivid Seats can be stressful and TickPick has limited options.

Most of these function largely as resale sites, although some (namely Ticketmaster and SeatGeek) are primary marketplaces, too. The price you pay may have less to do with the platform itself as the person who has possession of the tickets and happens to be selling them on there. I’ve known for months that I would be going to the games tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday, but I waited until five days ago to buy all my tickets because I knew the sellers would drop their prices as the events got closer. Ultimately, for tonight’s game, I saved $5 per ticket by doing that—enough to buy myself a hotdog at the stadium.

All of these platforms have improved significantly since I started doing this test two years ago. At no point today did I have to sign into an account or enter in my card details; even browsing as a guest, I was able to clearly see prices and click all the way through to the purchase page, which means you have more freedom to shop around. By far the biggest improvement, though, was that all of them except Ticketmaster showed the full price of tickets, including fees.

Ticketmaster had the highest prices by far here today, but its reach is also inescapable. On numerous occasions, I’ve purchased tickets through a platform listed here, only to have them come by email from Ticketmaster. I don’t really understand why, as Ticketmaster doesn’t own any of the other platforms, but you’ll most likely need to have an account with that marketplace to access your tickets, even if you aren’t using it for the actual buying part.

Crypto wallet owners beware: threat actors are using malicious browser extensions to steal your credentials. A recent campaign targeting Firefox is estimated to have included 150 extensions that allowed attackers to drain one million dollars from victims’ accounts.

The scheme, discovered by Koi Security and known as “GreedyBear,” spread through the Firefox add-ons store by impersonating well-known cryptocurrency wallet extensions. According to reporting from Bleeping Computer, the identified malware has been removed by Mozilla, but attackers may be able to quickly and easily mount similar campaigns targeting more users in the future. In fact, researchers have found a possible expansion of GreedyBear to the Chrome web store via an extension called Filecoin Wallet.

Crypto-draining malware spread through Firefox

As Bleeping Computer describes, the crypto-stealing extensions in Firefox started out relatively harmless before morphing into dangerous malware capable of draining funds.

Threat actors initially uploaded benign crypto wallet extensions for approval with branding that matched known platforms like MetaMask, TronLink, and Rabby and accumulated fake positive reviews to make them appear more trustworthy. Only later did they remove and replace the names and logos and inject malicious code, which turned said extensions into keyloggers that captured form field inputs and sent them to attackers’ servers. The compromised extensions also logged victims’ external IP addresses.

How to protect your crypto wallet from malware

Just because an extension has been approved by Mozilla or Google and made it to the official add-on store in Firefox and Chrome doesn’t mean it should be blindly trusted. Before adding a new extension to your browser, read user reviews (don’t just rely on star ratings) and check both the version history and the developer’s other projects for anything suspect.

For crypto wallets, a safer option than searching the add-on store is to go directly to the project’s website, which will link you to the legitimate extension.

WASHINGTON, August 11, 2025 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced the call for nominations to serve on the USDA Tribal Advisory Committee. A total of four appointments will be made by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins and Ranking Member Angie Craig of the House Committee on Agriculture.